The Essentialist Villain by Mikko Tuhkanen

Author:Mikko Tuhkanen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Time of the Aesthetic

Even if its repeated collapse or undoing is “the constitutive sign of psychoanalytic thinking” (FrB 9)—a sign that indicates the “speculative” nature of Freud’s thought—it is in Beckett that Bersani identifies more productive and far-reaching experimentations with the onto-ethics/aesthetics of failure. “Perhaps the most serious reproach we can make against Samuel Beckett,” he and Dutoit open their discussion in Arts of Impoverishment, “is that he has failed to fail” (AI 11). To speak of Beckett is to account for “the forms [failure] takes throughout his work” (AI 11), forms that, Bersani and Dutoit indicate, constitute Beckett’s monadology. Beckettian “forms of failure” are strictly synonymous with what Bersani and Dutoit in the title of a subsequent book will call “forms of being.” If ontology is an aesthetics, Beckettian ethics concerns the figuration of being in beings, driven by the force of individuation that, while an irresistible solicitation, constitutes an ethical failure to remain untraceable, that is, still with being, with what Beckett, in his first published short story, calls its “terrifying silent immobility.”23 Bersani proposes that the drawing of individuating boundaries must be thought of as “a metaphysical error or crime” (AI 140). This antinatalist position is the philosophical counterpart to Beckett’s onto-ethics/aesthetics of impoverishment, whose voice we listen to in the “feeble murmur seeming to apologize for not being dead,” “this long sin against the silence that enfolds us.”24

Like antinatalists, Beckett experiments with “[t]he prospect of an essential being prior to, and removed from, the conditions of all realized being” (AI 49). This formulation evinces Bersani’s early engagement with Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Blanchot: “essential being” names the synthesis of, on the one hand, the monadic virtuality that Deleuze finds in Proust and, on the other, Blanchot’s “essential solitude,” the solitude that, as “the pre-conceptual singularity of being,”25 is not the result of a withdrawal from relations but, “prelinguistic[ally],” precedes “the relational status of grammatical identities” (AI 51). This is, for example, Sula’s solitude, “a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people.”26

Put in Leibniz’s terms, especially those highlighted in Bertrand Russell’s turn-of-the-century study, essential solitude is monadic insofar as the monad is a subject in which all possible predicates are enveloped. This is the being that, as Bersani writes in an early review article, Beckett’s 1950s fiction aims at: “to get rid of all the things ‘that stick out’ from some mysterious core of being—everything from bodily protuberances to fictional characters and anecdotes and, finally, verbal inventiveness itself.”27 While Blanchot develops the concept of “essential solitude” most extensively in The Space of Literature, its early formulations take place already in his engagement with The Unnamable in The Book to Come.28 Like Beckett’s, Blanchot’s onto-ethics/aesthetics is marked by being’s “refusal to come into the world.”29 In this, it repeats the Unnamable’s quest for “a self that has somehow succeeded in failing

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